It's that time of the year again where Love Island airs and it’s all everyone and the media talks about for a solid two months. If you’re unfamiliar, the premise of the show is that single men and women from all around the UK spend a summer in the Love Island villa in the hopes of finding love or, as series have gone on, to find fame. Every social media platform I go on there’s some mention of the show and more specifically, the ‘quality’ of the contestants this time around. The year kicked off with five boys and five girls who coupled up with one another to kick start their Love Island journey.
In my opinion, looking at the original cast paints a very telling picture as to how the series is going to pan out in terms of diversity and what type of viewers this particular series is being produced for. This year started out with six white contestants and four BAME contestants, three of these being women. Within the first 48 hours, Shannon, was dumped from the island. With this, one of the already few BAME women was gone.
Throughout the time in the villa, all the men seem to have a very similar and specific type, this being a “petite, natural blonde” and as for the girls, the infamous “tall, dark and handsome”. Putting two and two together makes it clear that for the BAME women in the villa, Sharon and Kaz, their love island journey is going to be harder than the rest and this is my main grievance with the producers and casting directors. If the point of the show is for people to find love, why as a casting team would you prevent this from happening for your BAME contestants? Do they not qualify for love?
If you look at past seasons, a pattern becomes painfully obvious as to who the producers choose to be the ugly duckling of each season. Samira, Yewande, Leanne: three beautiful black women with amazing personalities who throughout the majority of their stint in the villa struggled to find a connection. As for Asian representation on the show, the producers don’t even seem to bother, the best viewers were given this season was 3 Asian girls, who have all been dumped from the villa without managing to find someone whilst in there.
For most BAME viewers, the experiences of the contestants of colour whilst on the show is a mirror for their experiences in wider media; last to be picked, first to be dropped. In my eyes, Love Island is a show produced and catered to the white majority, where diversity is only included to not only meet a quota, but more evidently to create a storyline at these women’s expense.
My advice to love island producer's is don’t include BAME women to produce a storyline that’s both unfair and inaccurate to real life. Every woman in the villa is beautiful, desirable and deserving of love, INCLUDING women of colour.
---- Rebekah Akinyele, BAME Officer
